Quality Service for Irrigation Management With A.J. van de Ven of Calsense

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the moon SD Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech Podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly, so thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am thrilled to have on longtime listener, first time caller, AJ Van Deven, CEO of CalSense. Hey AJ, thanks for joining the pod.

Hey Neil. Really excited to be here. Excited to be able to share a little bit of my story and what we do.

Yeah, likewise. We've gotten to know each other a little bit through the water world and in north county, working together with Innovate 78 and City of Carlsbad. But I'm super stoked to kind of share your story of how you got to be running a pretty innovative company. Calsense Carlsbad Base, correct?

Yep, correct. Been here since 1986.

Wow, that's awesome. How about you? Or actually give us a quick overview of what Calsense is And then we'll kind of dive back into your history.

Absolutely. You know, CalSense really is on a mission to make a global impact to sustainability efforts using artificial intelligence and automation. Our current product line consists of effectively a premier smart irrigation system. A smart irrigation controller leverages combination of of ground level sensors, satellite data, model data, and at least one high profile case in Texas drones as well to really optimize the amount of water that you need to keep your landscape looking lush and beautiful while reducing runoff and all the other things that we would consider water waste. Right. We don't want to over water, we don't really want to underwater either. And so that's where this technology really comes into play to make a big difference. Beyond the controllers themselves, we also provide a variety of weather sensors, flow sensors, including a new ultrasonic model offering, and they can all be remotely managed from any Internet connected device. So we've got a cloud application where you can make changes and look at diagnostics and run reports. We have an API, you can pull that data into your building automation system, H Vac, whatever you might have even put on a public website. And of course we've got our mobile app so you can go out there, turn valves on and off, look for problems and quickly make changes in the field without having to do a lot of work and running back and forth between the controller and where the valves are and things like that. Really exciting.

Wow, super cool. My background as a rocket engine sensor guy is just screaming to want to nerd out with you right now. And we will shortly. But we got to know, how'd you get here? Where are you from originally?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Bay Area, so born up in Cupertino and lived there for a few years, was able to with my father, got a position in Japan. So actually got to spend a few years at a very young age living in Japan amongst the Japanese people. You know, my father didn't want to be part of the expat community. He, he really wanted to immerse us. My sister and I both went to Japanese school. Running around in little Japanese school uniforms, great experience. Went back to the Bay Area. My father is a semiconductor, so you know, that was kind of the place to be. He retired at a pretty young age. And so when my sister got accepted to UCSD back in 1997, my parents said, hey, great opportunity, let's all move down to San Diego together. And I was in high school at the time between junior sophomore year and kind of terrified at that the prospect of moving Especially in high school, because that can be very disruptive. But it was a great transition for me. I was able to really get involved on campus. In fact, my senior year of high school I was able to teach teachers how to use technology and integrate it in the curriculums because in late 90s, teachers didn't know how to use PowerPoint or Excel or anything like that. Ended up going to Cal State San Marcos, wanted to stay local and got a degree in business and computer science and just really kind of embraced everything there was to do with those things and you know, kind of gets into where I came from. But how I got here at calcent is a very interesting story. So I started a business in college that was pretty successful and towards the end of my college career I was on the five and a half year path, by the way. So anybody who thinks you need to do it in four years, you don't, you can still be successful without it. I decided to get my own apartment and my parents like, oh, that's great. You know, you can also then pay for your own health insurance. And I didn't realize at the time that the COBRA for my father's health insurance was more expensive than rent for my apartment. So I was venting one of my friends at school and she said, hey, come work for Starbucks. Part time job, 24 hours a week, you get full medical benefits. I was like, sign me up. Of course I'm still going to school full time, still running my business, but it's fine, it's only 24 hours and free caffeine. It's perfect. Got to know a lot of the regulars and one day one of regulars came in and handed me a business card and said, hey, I'd love for you to come in for an interview and looked at business card. I'm like, all right. So I go to the website, which to be frank, was atrocious at the time and like, all right, so you guys turn sprinklers on and off. Like this does not sound like a very fun place to work. But it was for a software engineering position and I felt like that was probably a little bit better than to get benefits, than maybe serving people coffee at the time and if nothing else is a good opportunity to interview a little bit. Hadn't really done a lot of interviews in my career and so did that and took the interview and ended up actually really thinking, wow, this is cool as a computer scientist, get to work with all, all the different sensors that they'd never really done before and really just fell in love with it. And to be frank, my plan was every three years I was going to go to another company, make $10,000 more each move and do that until I retired. And something really kept me here. Part of it was the technology, just being able to work on different tech stacks from a hardware perspective, embedded software. I wrote our very first application that allowed remote sensing data to be used to provide real time weather information across the United States without need for sensor. Being able to do those kinds of projects kind of kept me engaged. And during that timeframe, apparently the leadership team saw something in me. And in 2014 they announced that amongst a small group that I would take over as president when the current president retired in three to five years. And about two years later he retired. And so, wow, that was a little quick. But it really gave an opportunity for me to take what I learned here as well from school and my other business experience and really try to shape this company into a company that really makes a difference. Trying to move away from selling a widget that turns sprinklers on and off to a true solution that solves one of the most important issues facing us today, which is water and not having enough water and you can't make more water. Every drop of water that's on the plant today has effectively been here since the planet was created. And so we need to use it as wisely as possible. And it's just now being at the helm of the company and really driving that change is so incredibly amazing. And every day I know that we're saving millions of gallons of water every 24 hours. And knowing that just makes everything better and excites me every single day to come to work, including weekends when I work, because it's everything that we do makes a difference. And it's just an incredible feeling.

Wow. So much to unpack from that pretty amazing to pretty much one where you got the job working at Starbucks, which is a great thing to know. Like you never know where opportunity comes from, that's for sure. Take us through. And even like the you thought, you know, every three years you'd move on to a new place and here you are CEO of the company. Just from a career, by the way.

That was also 16 years ago that I joined here. So I've been here a long time.

Yeah. Especially in growth phase of a company, you know, that's magnified in dog years for sure. So. Well, first just studying computer science at Cal State San Marcos. That's probably was a pretty early program there while you were there, was it.

Pretty new yeah, it's pretty new and it was fun because they had a good team of professors, but it was just really exciting because there are so many opportunities for them for the campus to grow. And so they were looking at where, you know, new technology they could bring in everything at that point was C. They started looking at Java and other languages as time went on and just really cool to be part of that whole growth process. And now, I mean their science and engineering platforms are phenomenal and knowing that I got to be kind of early stages of that was really cool.

Yeah, yeah. Now I think they've really formalized their engineering school which and really growing it. And I think I've got to imagine that helps you for talent to be able to go back to campus and find talent there. But you know, it sounds like you could just go to Starbucks and pick up your next computer science, you know, engineer.

Anyway, you know what, always looking for new candidates and honestly we found, in my personal experience, because of my experience with Starbucks, you find people the most random places. Sometimes it's reaching out. For example, I reached out to one person thinking they'd be a really good candidate for a director of sales position and kind of explained the needs. I'd known the gentleman for a while and he comes back and says, hey, I'm really happy where I'm at, but have you met my brother? He's actually much better suited for your exact needs. And turns out he was the perfect fit for us and he has actually accelerated our growth. You know, our funnel has grown nearly a factor of four in just this last year alone since he joined us.

Wow. Yeah. So you never know. Take us through a little bit of where technology has developed. So obviously just availability cloud when you started was not the biggest thing. You even said the website wasn't that big. Right. Like, you know, we were probably still in geocities back then with whole mouse and the trailing thing behind the mouse. How is technology overall advanced?

Like help CalSense so many amazing ways and I gotta mention I have not heard geocities in probably 15 years. So it's so amazing that you remember that. Yeah, it's crazy because we started as a company that made soil moisture sensors and little device you put in the ground. You hooked up to a third party controller and when the ground got too wet, it basically say, oh, cut the power, no more watering. And a few years later they decide, the founder and lead engineer decided, hey, what if we made a controller to manage this ourselves? Turning it on and off and back then that was revolutionary. And few years later they started to think about okay, what's the next thing in irrigation? Soil moisture is great, but that really it's hard to tell how much to water based on the soil. You know, the moisture in the soil. And so quickly evolved into being able to use weather data. And back then it was all in ground sensors. You had a tipping rain bucket and and you had a little soil or solar radiation sensor or ET sensor which stands for evapotranspiration. And having, you know, you'd have a one to one ratio. Here's one device hooked up to your one controller. And the very first management software that we developed was in Borland Pascal. That was a throwback for me knowing that they use Pascal. I learned that in high school. And just the evolution of how technology has improved on the controller side and moving into remote sensing data and now working with drones and satellite data and being able to not need soil moisture sensors in the ground because that information can be measured via satellites and being able to pump that into the system and make decisions based on all sorts of different inputs aside from just those on site sensors. And to be frank, we probably got into the cloud game later than some other people because we had this desktop application and it worked really, really well. People loved it and a lot of our customers are government. So security was always a huge concern. And people trying to move them towards cellular Ethernet, WI fi away from analog dial up modems with their desktop application was a really hard sell. But we really partnered with the county of San Diego, they were interested in moving towards cloud based and so we worked directly with them to build up a cloud application that managed our legacy platform. And now that we've evolved mobile application. When previously our very first handheld remote was literally a Motorola walkie talkie, you'd punch in a special code, hit the push to talk button and your sprinkler would come on, which is so cool. That was just blew my mind. And we evolved from that to a custom build remote with the screen where you could see, see flow and amp draw and things like that. But now with mobile technology, so much more power you can interface with multiple devices real time and get status updates. And it's amazing how things evolved. And even cellular we're looking right now even at potentially integrating with satellite to see for some of those areas where they don't have strong coverage on the cellular side, really rural areas opens up a whole new avenue for us.

Wow, interesting. Do you play in the edge computing space? Like do you kind of look at where the best Place for compute matters or is latency not as big a deal for what you're building?

It's not really a big deal at all. As we're moving more into AI, the BI platforms, the business intelligence platforms that we need to start leveraging, that becomes more of an issue of how much data can we dump in and how quickly can it spit out the data that we need. So that's something that we're working on right now. But you know, from a data perspective, our controllers consume less than a megabyte of data per month. So it's so little data that it doesn't matter.

Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like your customers are have pretty large scale landscaping and water needs potentially.

I mean, if you look at some of the city customers around here, you know, Encinitas, well over 100 controllers, City of Carlsbad, City of Powell, you look at city of Rancho Cucamonga, I think They've got nearly 600 controllers spread across the entire city. It's a huge amount of controllers.

Yeah. It's also a different need in a sense. Well, not need, but like, you know, for the last 20 years, a lot of homeowners have gone out of the whole like rip out landscaping to try to go to low drip. Have cities been able to do it in the same way in terms of changing up landscaping to change up their water needs?

They absolutely have, and there's been a lot of incentives to do so. Interestingly enough, we've seen good rebate programs here in California, but not nearly as strong as some other states. You know, Nevada, Las Vegas, they're saying, hey, outside of residential, no more basically ornamental turf. So unless it's a park or a ball field, you can't have normal grass. And so they're really incentivizing people to remove that really heavy water, need plant material and put in more native plant succulents, things like that that are much better for our, you know, for what we're doing now. But even then, looking at, you know, rooftop gardens and things like that, there's so many different opportunities that we're starting to see to really maintain greenery throughout the urban areas while reducing the amount of water necessary. And from a sustainability perspective, which is a big core focus of mine, it's exciting too because so much of our energy here in California, for example, goes towards treating, transporting and heating water. And so if we can save, if we can prevent somebody from using millions of gallons of water in a year because they didn't need to, that's potentially millions of Gallons of water they didn't have to pump from the Sierra Nevadas or that we needed to grab from the Colorado River. And so we're also helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because we can actually reduce the necessity on the energy grid by reducing water.

Absolutely. And here in San Diego, obviously, we've made some pretty big water investments from the new Carlsbad plant to do desalination, and now Oceanside is investing in recyclable water. Right. So is that a trend where you're seeing the big investments being made, both commercial and government on that?

Absolutely, there's so many. We're starting to see a lot more of those capital investments towards water and infrastructure. So even San Diego, they've got their pure water. San Diego, which is the recycled water, you know, San Diego, to your point, has made really, really big investments. And we're hoping that what they've done here becomes a model for other areas of both California and the country. You know what's exciting for a company like ours, we've always gone down this path of capital investments. And the sales pitch is really, look, if you need 100 controllers, you should try to get as much of that money up front because you want to realize the savings as quickly as possible across your entire city or school or school district, campus, whatever it may be. And what we've seen is while they're very interested in doing so, it's hard to get those kinds of numbers. Now if you're going to spend a million or more on irrigation controllers, that might require having to go to city council, might require a bond being issued, and that all of a sudden makes this type of technology potentially unattainable for a period of time. I remember there was one customer out in Utah and it took them seven years, three different election cycles of the city council before they approved the expenditure. Right. They'd already decided, this is what we need, this is what we need to buy, this is how much it's going to cost. And it just took city count that many city councils before they finally had the group necessary. And one of the ways that we're combating that now is offering our product hardware, software as a service and trying to really make it attainable to entities that may not have the resources to bring in that capital money. And, you know, Instead of buying 10 controllers a year for 10 years, get all 100, but only pay 10% of the costs the first year simply because you can amortize it over that time, you know. And so that's really been a game changer for Us in terms of getting smaller entities, school districts, universities, in a way that they can now afford to buy the product when they've wanted the product for quite some time.

Yeah. Wow. Quite the sales cycle to seven year. I was probably in your funnel in that. Your salesforce funnel for a little too long.

I feel bad for that salesperson.

Yeah, totally. But a pretty sweet celebration when it was one. Take us through kind of the change. So Covid obviously brought us, kept us in our homes, but it brought us kind of away from work. The hybrid aspect of work is changing corporate campuses and other things like that. What are you seeing that do in terms of like landscape? Because, you know, it's not a must to some campuses when the people are only there one or two days a week. What's the change mentality around just like where people work and play?

You know, it's actually, it's a really interesting question because some of the campuses that we've worked with actually have repurposed. Instead of adding new buildings, you know, they had maybe fleshed out, they're going to build five massive buildings on their campus. Two of them are done, the other three were basically still staged to be built. They're now converting those into open space and putting in plant material and really trying to make it a space. So when people do come to the corporate campus or the university, wherever it may be, that they can really enjoy what they have at home. One of the big benefits of working from home is that you want to get a break. You can go for a nice walk, you can go to the park, you can sit on the bench, whatever you want to do. And now they're opening up those opportunities on these campuses by making these beautiful outdoor areas with coverings and plants and walkways and meeting space. Because Covid has really affected the ability to meet in person. But everybody says as long as you're outdoor and you're separated by a certain amount of space, the risk is much lower. So they've created these outdoor spaces, outdoor eating areas to help facilitate that community feel, that culture in a way that they've never had before. And because that was my concern as well, while they're just going to stop building, they're going to stop putting in plants and they'll just sell the land off. And they really haven't taken that approach. And it's pretty, pretty cool to see that.

That is cool.

Yeah.

I think even just from the tech ecosystem where it used to be, what's on the inside that matters, like we got beer taps and ping pong Tables we found quality of life on the outside is kind of what matters more. Either we give you the freedom to work at the time place you want to work and the freedom to go do in a be comfortable in the place that you're working as well too. And I think that totally flows into that. That's interesting. What about you guys? Have you guys gone to remote or virtual or what's the CalSense team like now?

Yeah, you know, it's funny, I can actually tell you to the day when we made that decision. So Friday, March 13, 2020. And that was a day we basically said, hey, look, anybody who is not required to build the product here at our factory, you get to go work remote. So basically all the engineers, marketing, customer service, even our office manager ended up moving to the east coast. They packed up their equipment, we sent them with stand up desks, we sent them with Herman Miller Aeron chairs, dual monitor stands, docking stations, whatever they needed to be effective, you know, stipend for the ones that you know, so that we could provide them Internet if they didn't have a jet, you know, a mobile hotspot that we provided them, things like that. And we've seen people want to come back. And so we've got some people here that are more hybrid now. And that's just this past year. But prior to that, for nearly two years, it was me and our manufacturing staff here in Carlsbad. And it was cool that we could open up that opportunity. In fact, we even have one of our employees, her husband just graduated college using UGI Bill and they decided they want to go travel the United States in a camper truck. And so she's working full time as our marketing communications manager on the road with her laptop, her phone and her jetpack. Three years ago, I never would imagined us it would be like, all right, well, you know, take a sabbatical and come back. And the fact that she can do this is so cool. Like it just opens up so many opportunities for other people who want to really get out there and experience life. Because that's why we do this. This, we're doing this. We try to make a difference. But the reason we work is because we want to be able to enjoy the fruits of that labor. And I think Covid slowed some of that down because we all got inside and forgot that traveling was the thing. But now that's opened up, I think it really opens up opportunities to allow people to not just work remote, but work remote in the remote mountain areas and overseas and in Mexico, wherever You want to go go do it?

Absolutely, yeah. Work to live for sure in that regard. So what's some of the trends besides this work from home or work from wherever kind of trend that you thought was going to be change up the landscaping world? What other big macro things are kind of on your radar that you're looking? We can talk supply chain, we can talk about incoming inflation. Like what's some of the things that you as a CEO of a company keep on make sure that you're paying attention to?

You brought up several of them. Supply chain is a constant challenge. Being a manufacturer, it's a constant game of we used to be just in time manufacturing. Now we're kind of just in case supply chain. Yeah, let's buy extra components are getting obsoleted more quickly by some of the manufacturers. And so having to make sure that we can pivot and find crosses or new parts to maintain that, you know, our own ability to supply customers. We've always said our commitment to our customers is as much as feasible deliver within 7 to 10 business days of order being placed or order being processed, I should say, in case there's questions. But we have nearly maintained that throughout Covid, even with all supply chain challenges. And so, you know, that's a constant battle. We heard one manufacturer that was used to state seven to 10 business days now, six weeks. And for us in our industry, when a project gets approved and people want to go start installing, you need that product in seven to 10 days. You can't wait six weeks because your contractor is going to start getting into the weeds of not being able to meet their obligations. So it's a constant push. You know, hey, we've got this much cash, we need this many parts. How are we going to manage it? The best I can say is, you know, we've surrounded ourselves, we've got an amazing team now that really is in touch with our distributors, our vendors, everybody, the entire chain, from top to bottom, to make sure that we're keep being transparent and understanding what's going on, what's coming and trying to keep up with that. Because honestly, the world is changing, right? We talk about, you can say climate change. Unfortunately, I feel like that's become a little politicized. So I like to use climate crisis a little bit better. You know, it' effectively one of the hottest years on record here in the United States. There's fires raging in the United States. In Europe, I'm sure there's fires raging in Eastern Europe and Asia as well. And people are becoming more eco aware as a result. And so for us being in this sector where we truly make an impact by saving water and helping to reduce those greenhouse gas emissions and try to inspire other local businesses to do the same, you know, showing them that you can achieve a green business certification through the state of California as a manufacturer to prove that you are doing what you need to to be the best doer to the environment. Those are things that are going to make a change and continue to lobby every aspect of how people live and what people do. You know, I was really excited when things occurred where the straw thing, you know, like hey, let's all stop using straws in California. And so many people were like, well that's not going to make a difference. And it absolutely can make a difference. The reason it made a difference is because it showed that we can make a change when there's enough force behind it. Does reducing straws make that big an impact? Probably not. But we as a society were able to make a fundamental change to how we did something in this country that shows that we can do much bigger things as well. And so for me that's really from a macro perspective trying to understand what are those things that we can help drive more sustainable agriculture is a really big way, even just more sustainable landscape. Irrigation, you know, our controllers phenomenal for making sure that you don't over water. But how do you make sure what technology using to make sure that you're watering just the root zone of your plants as opposed to, you know, all the dirt around your plants. Looking at drip and subsurface drip and rotary nozzles as opposed to the sprays that blow the water away when the, you know, when they're on. And so there's just so many opportunities now and the fact that these upcoming generations just all they want to do is make a difference to this planet. And we're there now, the planet needs us and we have the ability to do it in any role. You know, with an organization from the CEO down to the shipping receiving person. You can offset your carbon footprint through ups, through their carbon neutral program. Little things like that. If everybody does it start to make a huge impact.

You're totally right. And it takes leadership in that regard. And sometimes that's one person in a company which then says a whole company's doing it, which then is a community and then a state. So it's not just top bottom, it's bottom up as well too. You're totally right in some of these movements. I think the other piece is building companies, certain entrepreneurs that could be deciding what kind of company want to build. Do I want to build another social media platform or do I want to build something that maybe changes the world a little bit. And I think San Diegans tend to have like, I want to have an impact on the things that I build. Do you get that sense that there's a kind of clean tech or ag tech, not necessarily movement, but density of companies in San Diego that you see?

Absolutely. It's almost dramatic. I was surprised because I came here thinking we turn sprinklers on and off. And once I took over and really started to learn more about the water infrastructure, where we get water from the companies that are in that space, it felt like all of a sudden they were coming out of the woodwork. And I'm not sure if they'd been there all along, but I believe that especially the last five or six years, there's been a dramatic increase in those types of clean tech companies that are really focused on trying to make that difference. Both in San Diego county and even specifically north county, we're seeing a lot of that. And it's just really exciting time to be part of that movement. And to your point, maybe movement's the wrong word, but I don't have a better word because there is a shift from a business landscape to be more sustainable and looking at every aspect of what we do, but starting to build products and services specifically targeted at making that deeper impact. And the great thing is you do that, then you all of a sudden become attractive to the most amazing talent within the region because that's what they want. Money only gives you so much. Having that deeper purpose driven organization really excites other people and makes you almost a destination employer.

Oh, that's a good point too on the recruitment piece. Super interesting. We've picked up on that trend as well and so have some of the cities. And so actually I'm formally inviting you here on the podcast late October, we are going to help put on a ag tech hackathon to see if we can pull together a hundred, you know, innovators to work on and advancing new ideas. So it'll be actually a whole weekend in Escondido, October 21st, 2nd and 3rd. We want like big tech employers to come and mentor and help people. People take ideas and validate them and progress them forward from a Friday to Sunday. So it's kind of a multi day hackathon. So inviting you now to come join in any way possible.

Very cool. That sounds super amazing. I love that.

Awesome. Well, yeah, well that's the start of one, and hopefully we begin a bunch of those. Speaking of being in San Diego, there's no other better way to ask this. What's your favorite taco spot? Because we got to know. That's the tacos and tech podcast.

Absolutely. So I'm going to give you two answers. So, first of all, I'm actually not a big taco fan. So as a result, if we're going to talk about my favorite Mexican dish locally, the chicken chimichanga at Fidel's Little Mexico in Solana beach is phenomenal. It's massive. Literally not an ounce of vegetables inside of it. Pure meat with your avocado, guacamole, sour cream or salsa. Guacamole, sour cream on top. Just absolutely phenomenal. Plus, they have phenomenal drinks. So if you are looking to pair your Mexican food with a good drink, think they do a phenomenal job. That said, I will say the world's best tacos I've ever had was at this tiny little outdoor eatery called Aga Souk Taco near Tukespan in Michoacan, Mexico. I visited there literally right before COVID The February before COVID hit on a trip with Ecolife Conservation to visit the UNESCO Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. That's one of kind of my pet passions is trying to make a difference, to see what we can do to improve human health in rural areas while seeing what we can do to reduce deforestation and that deforestation directly impacts monarch butterflies. And so anyway, we're on this bus and like, hey, we're going to go to this taco place. We pull up, like, there's no building here. Literally no building. And you see this little cover and you walk in and you've got a whole bunch of people making all the ingredients all handmade fresh. So the all farmed, sourced locally from rural farmers. So completely supporting the local community. Honestly, I mean, I could have eaten those tacos for days. I think I ate eight or nine tacos that day, and they were just phenomenal. I remember getting back in the vehicle and I was like, you had to roll me back to it because I was so full. But, oh, my God, if you ever make it down to Micho con Agasu Taco near to spawn. Absolutely incredible. They have a Facebook page. You gotta check it out.

Oh, wow. Incredible. I was gonna. I was surprised. I'm like, you even found the name easily. Could have just been like that truck in that parking lot at that point, that place.

Yeah, that took some effort. I'm not going to lie.

You did your research. We're getting ready for the podcast. I love that. Well, aj, this has been awesome. Not just getting to know what CalSense is building, but your passions as well and where you guys are headed. Thanks for being a part of that, the movement, but in general for showing people also another career path to starting at entry level and working your way up to being the leader of the company. I think people need to know that's a way to go.

I really appreciate it. I mean, this is phenomenal. I'm honored to be part of this. This is something I never expected to be invited to and it's just so cool being amongst some of the other people that you've spoken to. It's just, it's an absolute honor and super humbled. So I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Neil.

Absolutely. The honor is all ours as well too. Thanks, aj. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

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